As any blog grows, so do the demands on its writer’s time. An increased audience means increased attention, both positive and negative. Requests to look at this new product or write about that new company begin to come in just about the time when you’ve gotten into a groove writing, when your audience is becoming familiar with you and you them. In other words, at the point when you most clearly see that your audience really doesn’t want another product pitch.

Being a part of the Web20Workgroup has been a boon to Bokardo, and presumably, to the rest of its members. It meant an immediate increase in readership. And it meant a closer relationship with other bloggers who are firing off some of the best blog posts out there. The recent additions of Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Stowe Boyd demonstrate that the Workgroup is attracting some of the most-read bloggers on the Web.

Joe Reger, with whom Alex Barnett and I did a podcast last week, and Phil Pearson, both take me to task for omissions in my article on Structured Blogging.

Joe points out that I completely missed one of the major reasons to datablog: personal data mining. For example, let’s say you’re a runner. Joe’s software will allows people who run to input things like running times and graph those times over the course of a month or year. You can quickly and easily monitor your progress (or lack of it). This personal value has little to do with the value to the network that I was talking about….

it is easier than saying “all the lessons we’ve learned so far about what works on the web that you should be paying attention to”.

it signals we’re talking about the Web and newness and something being different than it was before

it’s easy and fast to say and use, and can be used by marketing people, software people, VCs, whomever

I’m a writer. So it is in my best interest to use terms that people use, and people use the term “Web 2.0”

But if someone doesn’t want to use that term, if they’re somehow offended, if they think it’s an attempt at self-promotion, or to ride some hype wave into prominence, then fine, I’ll use whatever term they want to use.

Running down the very short list of reasons why reviewers on Rottentomatoes.com didn’t like King Kong, one reason sticks out like a sore thumb: the movie was too long. In almost every case that a reviewer didn’t give the movie glowing reviews, it was because of its three hour length.

But why not 3 hours of enjoyment instead of 2?

The length of the movie had only a small effect on me. A couple of scenes could probably be pared down a minute or two, but the fact is that they’re so good it’s debatable if they shouldn’t have gone on longer. In one scene, the mishmash group of moviemakers and sailors trying to rescue Ann Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) get caught up in a stampede of Brontosaurai. For several minutes, they run alongside the dinosaurs trying to keep from getting squashed. At the end of it, those who escape carry on their search, and you realize you can stop holding your breath. It’s every bit as wild as a roller coaster ride…

Part 2 of the podcast Alex Barnett and I had with Marc Canter and Joe Reger is now available. In it, Marc Canter riffs about OPML, the Compatibility Box approach, and calls Structured Blogging the “next era of blogging”.

This was fun. Marc and Joe are great guys to talk to, both very articulate and smart. They’re hugely optimistic about structured blogging, and by listening to them at least some of that optimism is bound to rub off on you, too.

This Meeblog post is indicative of the genuine human voice that startup companies have. I love it. You won’t find this voice in companies over a year or two old. They’ve usually found that they’re the center of the world by then, and so they don’t expose their indecision with such openness and questioning as Sandy does in this post.

For those unfamiliar with Meebo, it’s a tool that allows folks to connect to their favorite chat programs indirectly through the site, allowing you to bypass the many firewalls that block chat programs and having it all on one screen. TechCrunch recently reported on their rediculous growth.